Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host of The Daily Challenges and today is Tuesday, so it’s the day we take the topic we’ve explored this week and we try to see what the Bible has to say about. Yesterday I talked about how following Jesus means a reset to everything in life, including our attitudes around our work. That can be hard because work is such an overwhelming aspect of our lives. It can drive so much of what we do and say in life. We spend most of our waking time working. Even if it’s unpaid work, it’s still work that we find ourselves engaged in day to day. We need a sense of how do followers of Jesus see work a little differently than others. It’s going to come from an unlikely source. It comes from a letter than Paul wrote to Christians in a city called Colosse. It’s called the letter to the Colossians and as part of that letter, directly addressed what he called bond servants.

Here’s what he had to say. Bond servants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye service, as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, hearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your bond servants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Well, bond servants isn’t really a term we use very much today. For us, it’s probably analogous to employees, but back then, bond servants were sort of a blend of what we would know as employees and what we would call slaves today. It’s hard because slavery has changed over the centuries.

When we think of slavery in our culture, we generally think of North American slavery and the horrors and oppression of that mode of slavery. No kind of slavery is all right, but we just want to understand a little bit of the culture that Paul was writing to. It was a culture where slavery was very much a reality. It may have been an unquestioned reality for people. It was just the way of the world worked. What Paul does is he undermines a little bit. He subverts it. You can hear him speaking directly to the bond servants, the slaves. Those who, for one reason or another, found themselves wholly owned by someone else. What he does is he tells them they are not wholly owned, even though that’s what it may say on paper, even though that’s what people may assume in their culture.

Those who happen to be followers of Jesus are being told directly by one of Jesus’ first followers, one of his apostles, that they are not wholly owned by their earthly masters. He distinguishes between the earthly masters and their Heavenly Master. They are actually wholly owned by their Creator, by God. Although in this world, the kingdom of this world, there maybe people who think they wholly own other human beings, they are not. Can you imagine the freedom that comes from knowing you are not wholly owned when everybody you know thinks you are and when the legal system thinks you are wholly owned by someone else. Imagine the freedom that that gives to someone in a system that oppresses them, knowing that they are free.

Now, unfortunately, this passage and others like it, have been used to condone horrific abusive forms of slavery like those we’ve seen in North America in the last few centuries. Those need to be condemned and they have been condemned by Christians. Unfortunately, there are those who have found in the Bible words that they could twist and use to justify terrible crimes. That’s happened. It continues to happen and Christians need to continue to read the Bible as a whole to wrestle with God’s words in the whole of the Bible about the dignity of human beings and speak out when that kind of oppression happens at all and especially when it’s justified using the words of the Bible twisted for people’s selfish gain. One of the biggest hints that this passage can’t really be used to condone slavery where people are wholly owned and abused and oppressed is that Paul addresses his passage to the bond servants and to the slave owners. What he wants the slave owners to know is that they need to remember the dignity in every human being. That those who work for them are not wholly owned by them. Those slave owners will have to answer to God some day because He is the one who created us all and who owns everything on this earth including the atoms that we were put together with. They are all His and although we have care of it for a time, what we could call stewardship, like an investment advisor takes care of somebody’s money, we take care of God’s creation.

We need to remember that we are not our own and we are especially not in any position to own and control and abuse another human being. He wants both slave owners and the bond servants to have the same attitude of seeking out first the kingdom of God where all humans have equal dignity, where all humans are equal in the sight of God, where all humans have a responsibility to care for one another, to be generous with one another. There is a lot of great material in this passage, obviously, and it’s culturally hard for us to catch because it does speak about bond servants and slave owners and that’s hard for us to understand today. Tomorrow we’re going to try to enlighten what this has to do with our modern working life. In the meantime, I want you to try to think about that. Your question for today, which I hope you’ll share with others, maybe start a little discussion group, is this, what might this say to employees today? Is there any way that we, today, can be owned by our work?

Well, I hope you have a great discussion. This one is certainly a topic that can get people going, so I really hope you do share this with somebody. Remember, we’re reading the Bible in sync as a community. If you’ve been following us for a little while, make sure you’re reading our daily Bible passage as well. It’s just another way that our community tries to stay in sync even though we’re not meeting together in person very often. We can continue learning to follow Jesus as one community in scattered mode so our gathered mode is all the more exciting when it happens. Have a great day. I will see you tomorrow.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - February 24, 2014

Monday - A New Idea - Reset Sex and Marriage

Hi! Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan, you host for the daily challenges. These daily challenges are meant to help people explore what it means to follow Jesus even during our busy commuting lifestyle. If you've never looked into what that means in the first place, I'd really encourage you, check out our Christianity 101 course first. You can take it live in-person or through our mobile app; great introduction to the basic concepts of what it means to follow Jesus that we try to build on in the Daily Challenges. Every day and week, we follow a rhythm to help us, as one community, learn what it means to follow Jesus even when we're not physically together. Every Monday,we introduce the idea for the week. Every Tuesday, we see what the Bible has to say. Every Wednesday, we allow ourselves to be challenged in our thoughts. Every Thursday, we try to apply it and live it out in our lives. Every Friday, we take time to pray and reflect on the topic. Saturday is a day for rest and then Sunday is a day for community. We're going to start gathering together as one community soon. We just recently had a great baptism service and celebration where a number of our members came together in one place to worship God. We're going to do that more and more often over this year. So, stay tuned for some of our upcoming gatherings. We're in a series right now called, "Reset." We're looking at how deciding to follow Jesus resets everything in our lives. We've looked at a number of areas that it impacts. This week we're going to look at how following Jesus impacts our view of sexuality and marriage. Last week, we saw how following Jesus means we see the body and food differently, and how they are good things God created, but can be abused when used in the ways God didn’t create them to be used. We also saw how following Jesus means his Holy Spirit lives in us, which is why our bodies can be called a temple. This means we can’t pretend to own our bodies, as followers of Jesus, but instead need to show reverence to God’s presence in us by caring for these bodies, using them as their creator intended. This is going to be a helpful way to see our sexuality, as well. The passage from the Bible’s first letter to the Corinthians that we explored talked about food and the body as a temple, but Paul, the author, was not really making a point about food. He was using food as an example to show how the Corinthian Christians were abusing their gift of sexuality. He challenges them not to be distracted, and think that sex is the most important thing in their lives, nor their source of identity, comfort or security. He wants them to stay focused on God, and see all other things in life through that lens. He wants them to think of themselves as people on a journey with a purpose, which necessarily means they will be different than those around them who are not on the same journey. That’s hard in our world – particularly with sexuality, because we are a culture obsessed with sex, and it’s easy to forget there is more to us than biology! Some Christians or churches have responded by never talking about it, making it seem like sexuality and our bodies have nothing to do with God. But Paul takes neither approach; he says our bodies matter to God, because we matter to God. See attached video, or click here: https://vimeo.com/664454 Sex is clearly on people’s minds. One survey asked Canadians how often they’d like to have sex, more than half of Canadians polled said they’d like at least twice a week. 20% of men said they’d like sex every day, but only 3% actually experience it. There are some limits in people’s minds: In a Today’s Parent magazine survey, 82% of parents say sleep is more important than sex. The magazine readily admitted their sample was skewed heavily toward parents of young children, and primarily women. On that note, fifty-seven percent of U.S. women would choose their mobile device over sex, according to another survey. These represent some curious limits on how much sex people want, but God puts some serious limits on sex, that we’ll explore later this week. In the meantime, here’s a question to consider: Question: In what ways is our culture obsessed with sex? Think of commercials, businesses, events, etc. Does our culture place any limits on sex? Well, have a great discussion. Don't forget, we're reading the Bible in sync as a community. So, check our website or app to see what today's Bible reading is. Have a great one.

From Series: "Reset"

When our computers get bogged down and unmanageable, we know to hit a reset button to simply start over. Wouldn't a reset button be great in life? We know it would be complicated, with all our responsibilities and routines to consider, but imagine the freedom and refreshment of a new start in life! What would you do differently? What would you pay more attention to, and what would you ignore? How would you avoid getting bogged down and broken again? The great news is, in coming to earth as Jesus Christ, God has begun to "reset" our universe, our world, and even us. We're invited to start over with him, in what he calls his kingdom. We're invited to start a new life with a clean slate. What gets wiped clean, and lived differently, when God resets our lives? We'll explore how God resets these key areas of our lives: Reset: Goals Reset: Time Reset: Money Reset: Work Reset: Body & Food Reset: Sex & Marriage Reset: Family Reset: Compassion Reset: Nature Reset: Society Reset: Death Join us for the next several weeks, and invite God to reset your life.

Discuss

More From "Reset"

Powered by Series Engine